The Implicit Dimension of Meaning: Ways of “Filling In” and “Filling Out” Content

Erkenntnis 80 (1):89-109 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures , which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on the basis of sub-sentential clauses—cases of so-called embedded implicatures—as well as from discourse segments containing several sentences—cases that Geurts calls ‘multiplicatures’. I will argue that they arise also from contents that are themselves implicit, such as presupposed contents or other implicatures. All but the first sort of case are difficult for the traditional Gricean AT account to handle, whereas they fall naturally out of an account that sees conversational participants as engaged in conversational tailoring—i.e., as engaged in a process of shaping informational and discourse structural properties of utterances in their successive conversational turns, and hence shaping their interlocutors’ cognitive environments

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,449

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Embedded implicatures.François Recanati - 2003 - Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1):299–332.
Do Conversational Implicatures Express Arguments?Martina Blečić - 2018 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):335-350.
Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences.Robert van Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2004 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13 (4):491-519.
Local pragmatics and structured contents.Mandy Simons - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (1):21-33.
Two Types of Implicature: Material and Behavioural.Mark Jary - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (5):638-660.
Unfinished speech acts.Claudia Bianchi - 2024 - Synthese 204 (5):1-18.
Exhaustive Interpretation of Complex Sentences.Robert Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2004 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13 (4):491-519.
Can Entailments Be Implicatures?Andrei Moldovan - 2019 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk, Philosophical Insights Into Pragmatics. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 43-62.
Local pragmatics: reply to Mandy Simons.François Recanati - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (5):493-508.

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-09-18

Downloads
67 (#327,291)

6 months
1 (#1,572,794)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Anne Louise Bezuidenhout
University of South Carolina

Citations of this work

Embedding irony and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (6):674-699.
Cognitive Environments and Conversational Tailoring.Anne Bezuidenhout - 2015 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 15 (2):151-162.

Add more citations